NASA on Friday suspended an asteroid mission, blaming the late delivery of its own navigation software. The Psyche mission to a strange metallic asteroid of the same name was supposed to launch in September or October. But the agency’s Jet Propulsion Lab was months behind in delivering its navigation, guidance and control software – a crucial part of any spacecraft. Engineers “just ran out of time” to test it, officials said Friday.
Now the space agency will take a step back, and an independent review will look at what went wrong, when the spacecraft could launch again, and even if it should go ahead, Lori Glaze said. head of planetary science at NASA.
NASA has already spent $717 million (nearly Rs. 5,600 crore) on Psyche and its expected total cost including the rocket to launch it is $985 million (nearly Rs. 7,700 crore). The small, car-sized spacecraft was originally scheduled to arrive on its asteroid in 2026 after a journey of more than a billion miles.
Now that the software has been delivered, there are no known issues with the spacecraft except “we just couldn’t test it,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, chief scientist for the Psyche mission.
“There’s this challenge that we couldn’t overcome in time to launch into 2022 with confidence,” she said.
There are still at least two launch opportunities next year and more in 2024 to hit the asteroid that sits in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, JPL Director Laurie Leshin said. This means that Psyche would not arrive on her asteroid until 2029 or 2030.
But calculating launch times is complicated because the mission needs appropriate sunlight conditions and the asteroid “spins like a roast chicken instead of a spinning top,” Elkins-Tanton said.
Two more small missions were going to take place on the SpaceX Falcon heavy rocket and NASA is looking at what will happen to those.
Psyche is just the latest addition to NASA’s fleet of asteroid exploration spacecraft. Osiris-Rex is on its way back to Earth with the rubble of the asteroid [Bennu](https://gadgets360.com/science/news/bennu-asteroid-nasa-boulder-body-armour-protection-meteorites-osiris-rex-spacecraft-3078583). Last year, NASA launched the Lucy and Dart ships to explore other space rocks and test if a rocket could deflect an asteroid heading for Earth.
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